The Little Fan That Ended the Window Air Conditioner Fight

Every July, Greg and I have the same argument. It is not about money, and it is not about the kids, who are both grown and living in other states now. It is about the window air conditioner in our upstairs bedroom. I am 55. He is 58. And somewhere around my fifty-second birthday, the two of us stopped agreeing on what a comfortable bedroom feels like. What ended it, in July, was not a bigger air conditioner. It was a small Levoit Windi fan, thirteen inches tall, sitting on my nightstand.

Here is the shape of it. Our bedroom faces west, which means the afternoon sun leans on that wall from about two o'clock until it goes down, and by nine at night the room is still holding the heat. We have one window unit. Greg hauls it up from the basement in June, sets it in the window, and puts the thermostat at 70. Then he rolls over and sleeps like a man who has never once woken up with his sleep shirt stuck to his back. I wake at two in the morning with my heart going and a hot, damp patch under my shoulders. I get up, I stand in front of the unit and let it hit me, and I turn it down to 66. Twenty minutes later Greg is awake and cold and turning it back up. We did that for three summers.

Before this summer I had already worked on the soft side of the problem. The BEDELITE cooling pillowcases came first, back in March, because they were the cheapest thing to try. Then the MATBEBY cooling mattress pad in April. Then the Elegear cooling blanket in late May, and two sets of NACHILA bamboo pajamas in June. All of it helps. I mean that. Flipping the pillow to the cool side after a flash is real, and the pad does take the trapped heat out from under my back at two in the morning. But none of it moves air. And when I wake up hot, what I actually want is air on my face.

That is how the Levoit Windi ended up beside my head. It is a mini tower fan, about thirteen inches tall and 3.4 pounds, so it stands on the nightstand without taking over the whole surface. It does not go in the window. It does not touch Greg's thermostat setting. It just makes a narrow column of moving air that reaches my pillow and stops before it gets to his side of the bed.

The air conditioner cools the room. The fan cools me. Those turned out to be two different jobs, and for three summers I had only been solving one of them.

How I actually use it is boring, and it works. Before bed I set it on the lowest of the five speeds and put the timer on, because I do not want air on me all night, only through the stretch where I am falling asleep. When I wake at two with a flash, I reach for the remote on the nightstand and bump the speed up without sitting up, without turning on a light, without waking Greg. That remote is the reason the Levoit stayed on the nightstand instead of going back in the closet. A fan you have to get out of bed and crouch down to adjust rather defeats the point at two in the morning.

The noise is the part I did not expect. Levoit lists 20 decibels across all speed levels, and I cannot verify a number with my ears, but I can tell you that on the low speeds I hear the window unit's compressor more than I hear the fan. Greg claims he cannot sleep through any noise at all, and he has not mentioned this once since July. It runs at 7.5 watts, which matters in a house that already has a window air conditioner grinding away all night. It oscillates, though I mostly leave it pointed straight at my pillow.

I want to be straight with you about what this thing is. It does not cool the room. On a hot afternoon the bedroom is still hot and the window unit is still doing the heavy lifting. It is a small fan, thirteen inches tall, and all it does is move air across my side of the bed. That is the entire job. It just turns out that was the job I needed done at two in the morning, and no amount of turning the thermostat down was ever going to do it, because Greg cannot sleep in a cold room and I cannot sleep in still air.

We have not had the thermostat fight since July. I leave the window unit where Greg sets it. When I get hot, I reach for the remote. He sleeps through it, I cool down, and neither of us has to win. Three summers of arguing, and what ended it was a thirteen inch fan and the fact that I stopped trying to cool the whole room in order to cool myself.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to quit trying to win the thermostat argument, because you will not win it and neither will he, and the two of you will just be tired and irritated with each other on top of everything else. I would tell you to start with the cheap things, the pillowcases and the pajamas, because they help more than you expect and they cost less than the fan does. I would tell you that if you are waking up hot with the air conditioner already running, the missing piece is probably not more cold air in the room but moving air on you, and a fan pointed at your side of the bed does something a window unit never will. I would tell you to buy one with a remote, because you will not want to get up in the dark. And I would tell you to talk to your doctor about the flashes themselves. A fan is a comfort, not a treatment. I fill prescriptions for a living. I do not write them, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.